1986 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Having gone from
universally loved to universally reviled, Ender Wiggin continues to
suffer for your sins.
Gah. Like Ender's Game, everything here is set up to make Ender
look perfect. He arrives on a colony world beset by problems, and in a
few days he's casually solved everything from the
occasionally-murderous aliens to the young boy who's behaving badly.
And a superintelligent AI nobody else knows about is his personal
friend. And he gets the girl that he fell in love with when she was a
child (and he was an adult, because relativity – pinched from The
Forever War, probably – and it's just as creepy here as when Steven
Moffat does it in later years; actually, probably more so, given the
Mormons' history of "marrying" very young girls to adult men). There's
no mention of her feelings on the matter: Ender is perfect, so of
course she must have fallen in love with him too.
By Novinha's calculations, she was still young enough to have
another six children, if they hurried.
It's heavy-handed and preachy, and the characters do exactly what is
needed in order to convey the author's message whether or not it's in
any way related to their established personalities (such as they are).
All female leaders are either incompetent or evil. The Catholics are
all wrong, though some of them can be brought to understand that Ender
Is Always Right. A big secret discovered in chapter 1 isn't revealed
to the reader until chapter 16 (of 18), apparently to try to maintain
some slight sense of tension, though there are so many clues given
that the alert reader will have worked it out much earlier and be
waiting for the characters to catch up.
Dona Cristo was a brilliant and engaging, perhaps even beautiful,
young woman
Gah. The one vaguely interesting idea is in the title, someone who
will discover all the secrets of a dead person and reveal them to the
community. Naturally when Ender does it it works perfectly with no
drawbacks.
Oh, and here's a really terrible idea to balance the one interesting
one, describing someone's cybernetic eyes:
Only one eye was used for sight, but it took four separate visual
scans and then separated the signals to feed true binocular vision
to the brain. The other eye contained the power supply, the computer
control, and the external interface.
Er, no, sorry, the optics she does not work like that. And it's not
even important to the story!
Followed by Xenocide. Reread for Neil Bowers'
Hugo-Nebula Joint Winners Reread.
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